The Emperor of Mankind, often referred to by His faithful as the "God-Emperor," the "Master of

Mankind," or simply "the Emperor," is the immortal Perpetual and psyker who serves as the reigning
monarch of the Imperium of Man, and is described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult as
the Father, Guardian and God of Humanity.

The Chaos Gods and the Daemons of the Warp refer to Him as "the Anathema" for He is the greatest
embodiment of universal order in the galaxy today and the most potent foe of Chaos in existence. He
was, and remains, the most powerful Human psyker to have ever been born.

He has sat immobile, His body slowly crumbling, within the Golden Throne of Terra for over 10,000
standard years. Although once a living man, His shattered, decaying body can no longer support life, and
it is kept intact only by the cybernetic mechanisms of the Golden Throne and a potent mind itself
sustained by the daily sacrifice of thousands of lives.

The Emperor chose to sacrifice His immortal life at the end of the Horus Heresy in the service and
protection of Mankind. To Humanity's countless trillions across the galaxy-spanning Imperium, He is
nothing less than God. Through His Imperium, Humanity is united and remains one of the most powerful
intelligent species in the Milky Way Galaxy as well as its most dominant in terms of both population and
territory held.

United under one government, Mankind is able to survive the myriad deadly threats it faces from aliens,
the forces of Chaos and the Traitors, Heretics and mutants that lie within the Imperium's boundaries.

The Imperium's rule, carried on in the Emperor's name since the end of the Horus Heresy by the High
Lords of Terra and a multitude of Imperial organisations, has been long, oppressive and necessarily
harsh.

It has also resulted in technological and cultural stagnation, and a regression into tyranny, superstition
and religious obfuscation and intolerance that would have horrified the Emperor.

Though He is no longer responsive to external stimuli, the Emperor still lies at the very heart of the
Imperium's continued existence. Although He cannot be directly involved in the day-to-day running of
Humanity's galactic government, His existence on the Golden Throne is vital to sustaining the Imperium,
since His powerful mind's presence in the Immaterium maintains and directs the Astronomican, the
psychic beacon that makes possible faster-than-light Warp travel and is vital to Imperial shipping,
transportation, commerce and communication.
However, the maintenance of this beacon requires the aid of other psykers, whose lifeforces are slowly
drained away by the Emperor to power the beacon. One thousand psykers a day give their lives to
maintain the Emperor's psychic strength.

He is said to still guide His race through the psychically-reactive divination tool known as the Emperor's
Tarot, which select psykers can consult to gain a glimpse of the future and the Emperor's will. He is also
said to constantly battle the Chaos Gods in the Warp and prevent their further intrusion upon the
material universe.

His mind must remain vigilant at all times throughout the entire Imperium to safeguard the Human race
and to offer His protection to the faithful. Above all else, it is Mankind's collective belief in the Emperor's
divinity that serves as its greatest protection from Chaos and the other hideous dangers that plague the
galaxy. As the Imperial Creed has taught for over 10,000 standard years, the Emperor protects...

Contents

1 History

1.1 Original Origin

1.2 Current Origin

1.3 Unification Wars

1.4 Great Crusade

1.5 Council of Nikaea

1.6 Imperial Webway Project

1.7 Horus Heresy

2 At Present

3 God-Emperor

4 The Star Child

5 The God-Incarnate

6 Wargear

7 Notes
8 Videos

9 Sources

History

Original Origin

Note: This section discusses material that was once considered canon but whose canonicity may now be
questionable.

The Emperor and his most trusted advisor, Malcador the Sigillite.

The Emperor is the collective reincarnation of all the shamans of Neolithic Humanity's various peoples,
the first Human psykers. The foul Warp entities that would become the four Great Powers of Chaos had
not yet fully formed when the Emperor was born on Earth during prehistoric times, somewhere in
ancient central Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the 8th Millennium B.C.

But even before the birth of the Emperor, as Humanity grew and progressed, the Warp began to become
increasingly disturbed by the dark undercurrents of Humanity's collective psyche, and the shamans
began to lose their former ability to reincarnate into new bodies. Instead, upon dying, their souls were
consumed by the entities and Daemons of the Warp.

Eventually the shamans of Humanity, unable to reincarnate, would become extinct, and without the
shamans and their psychic abilities to guide the race, Humanity would inevitably fall prey to the
corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Aeldari. In these ancient days, all the shamans
of Earth gathered in a grand conclave to decide what must be done to stave off the day when they had
all been consumed by the Warp.

In the end, the shamans decided to pool their collective psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul
in a single Human body to create an individual they called "the New Man." The thousands of shamans,
as one, took poison, and as one, they died, their souls flowing into the Immaterium in a rush of psychic
power that overwhelmed those Daemons who sought to feast upon it with a cleansing, purifying fire, a
flame imperishable that became one soul out of many.

A standard year later the child who would become the Emperor was born in a Neolithic settlement of
Anatolian herders and farmers of a normal mother and father, with normal brothers and sisters. His
psychic power was so great that its energies altered His genome and physiology in the womb and
rendered Him immortal so He would no longer need to reincarnate and could not be assaulted by the
daemonic creatures of the Immaterium upon His death. As He grew older, His potent psychic powers
began to manifest.

For thirty-eight thousand Terran years, He wandered over the Earth and throughout Human history. He
travelled among the different peoples of Mankind. While He had first been only an observer of
Mankind's triumphs and follies, He soon began to help where He could, using His ancient wisdom to
spread efficient government, crop management, animal husbandry, technology and peace. He used His
influence carefully, at first adopting only the guise of a normal man, and without revealing His true
nature.

As the millennia passed, the man who would become the Emperor watched the Human race develop. He
travelled the entire globe, watching and helping, sometimes adopting the persona of a great leader or
advisor. In times of trouble He became a crusader, a religious leader or even a messiah, at other times He
remained a back-stage contributor to events, an advisor to kings, a court magician, a pioneering scientist.

Many of the guises He adopted were humble, others became monumental figures of world history or
religion. At times of crisis He would be there, steering the Human race along a narrow path to survival
that only He could see.

As the Human race prospered and advanced the Warp became increasingly disturbed. The man who
would become the Emperor was aware of how the extreme sides of the Human character were feeding
the nascent Chaos Powers. Despite His best efforts to promote peace and harmony across Old Earth, the
instinctive values of martial honour, ambition, defiance, and self-satisfaction could never be eradicated
from the Human character.

Some of the New Man's plans proved less than successful; seeds of wisdom often failed to flourish or
grew into uncontrollable monstrosities leading to eras of persecution and war.

The Chaos Gods sensed the presence of the New Man, the "Anathema" as they would name Him, and
His efforts to curb their own power and growth. Even before they became fully conscious in the
Immaterium the Ruinous Powers recognised the man who would become the Emperor as their greatest
enemy.

Khorne was the first of the four major Chaos Gods to wake fully, and an era of wars and conflict soon
raged across the globe to herald his birth. Tzeentch was the next, and nations and politics soon grew to
maturity with all of their implicit intrigues and double-dealings.

Nurgle was the third to awake and plagues swept across Old Earth's continents claiming many souls for
the Lord of Decay. By the end of the European Middle Ages on Terra, all three of these Chaos Gods had
awoken to full consciousness. The fourth, Slaanesh, still slumbered, to be awakened by the follies of a
different species, the Aeldari.

But as the New Man's psychic powers further developed, He became ever more aware of the terrible
dangers that awaited Mankind in the broader universe and He resolved to do all in His power to defend
and guide Humanity towards a future as the predominant species in the galaxy.

As more and more Humans were born with the mutant psyker genes that granted them the ability to
wield the potent power of the Immaterium in the last centuries of the Dark Age of Technology, and
Humanity suffered from the deadly effects of uncontrolled psykers that heralded the onset of the Age of
Strife, the Emperor realised that He would have to take a more direct and open role in Human affairs
than ever before.

Following the birth of Slaanesh after the Fall of the Aeldari in the 30th Millennium, and the end of the
Warp Storms that had prevented interstellar communications and travel from the Sol System, the
Emperor determined that the time had come to directly steer the history of Humanity once more, or see
the Human race ultimately go extinct due to the troubles of Old Night.

Current Origin

However, the above account is now considered largely apocryphal. In truth, the Emperor's origin and
history prior to unifying Terra is largely mysterious and undetailed, though His immortality and
extraordinary psychic abilities still define Him.

The first mention of the Emperor by that name in Imperial records is when He unified Terra at the end of
the Age of Strife in the 30th Millennium. Horus mentions that the Emperor lived "in Anatolia, in his own
childhood" when talking of his first meeting with the Emperor. It is known that He had been immortal
and ancient even before His ascension to the Golden Throne over 10,000 Terran years ago.

The Emperor is the "New Man," the first and greatest of the new race of Human psykers. He is also the
collective reincarnation of the extinct shamans, sorcerers and wise-men who had guided primitive
Humanity during prehistoric times.
As the Emperor grew older His powers began to manifest themselves and become more potent and He
gradually remembered His thousands of past lives, adding all of their knowledge and experience to His
own.

One account of the Emperor's origin goes so far as to say that He had mortal brothers and sisters and
claims that He was born in the 8th Millennium B.C. in a primitive Neolithic village along the banks of the
Sakarya River in Anatolia.

While he was still an adolescent, the Emperor's father was murdered by his uncle. While preparing his
father's body for a primitive funeral ritual, he received a clairvoyant vision of his murder. Later, the boy
who would become the Emperor calmly approached His uncle and stopped his heart with a slight use of
His telekinetic psychic abilities, displaying neither sorrow nor malice for the deed.

According to the Emperor Himself, this was the moment He realised that Humanity needed law, order,
and the guidance of a ruler to reach its full potential. At some time after, He left His village for the "first
city of Humanity," likely one of the Sumerian city-states of ancient Mesopotamia.

For thousands of standard years before becoming the Emperor, He guided and watched Humanity
develop over the course of its history, assuming the guise of a large number of historical personages. He
was aware that the darker extremes of Human nature were feeding the growth of the Chaos Gods in the
Warp, and so He sought to promote peace and harmony on Earth and thereby curb the growth of the
Ruinous Powers' strength.

Whatever His true origins, the man who would become the Emperor was the most powerful psyker ever
born among Humans. Before the Emperor began His rise to power, He was also an anonymous Perpetual,
a member of a mutant branch of Mankind gifted with effective immortality due to extremely rapid and
efficient cellular regeneration.

Whether this ability of the Perpetuals came about naturally or was artificially induced is unknown, but
the Emperor was present during the time of Humanity's prior star-spanning civilisation in the period now
named the Dark Age of Technology. He was known to associate with other Perpetuals like Himself in that
era. Among these was a woman named Alivia Sureka.

Together, she, several other Perpetuals and the man who would one day become the Emperor travelled
to the Knight World of Molech aboard a one-way voidcraft. There, they discovered a Warp Gate into the
Realm of Chaos which the future Emperor entered.

He forged an unknown bargain with the Chaos Gods and was imbued with new powers and the
knowledge required to ultimately create the primarchs. The Emperor left Sureka behind to look after the
Molech Gate until such time as the world could be safely protected by the coming of the future
Imperium of Man.

Despite His early dealings with them, the Chaos Gods themselves later recognised the Emperor as their
greatest enemy among all the intelligent beings of the galaxy, naming him "the Anathema." Only at the
end of the Age of Strife did the Emperor emerge from obscurity to take a more direct hand in the future
of Humanity, conquering the warring factions of Mankind's homeworld and establishing His direct rule
over Old Earth.

The Emperor accepted the deaths of the many innocents that resulted from His conquest with great
remorse in order to achieve the greater good of unifying Humanity and protecting it from the manifest
predations of the Warp.

With the assistance of the ancient Mechanicum on Mars, who joined with the Emperor and the people
of Terra in the Treaty of Mars that formally founded the Imperium of Man in the late 30th Millennium,
the Emperor created the first Space Marines and fleets of interstellar starships that would carry His
armies across galactic space.

The objective was a Great Crusade that would unify all of the planets colonised by Humanity during the
Dark Age of Technology prior to the Age of Strife into one Imperium of Man. The crusade would also
subdue, destroy, or force into exile all intelligent alien races from the Milky Way Galaxy. The galaxy was
to become the Imperial Domain, the manifest destiny of Humanity.

The Emperor also created the superhuman primarchs from whom the Space Marines' gene-seed was
later developed to serve as His primary military commanders for the Great Crusade. The Chaos Gods,
however, sought to thwart the Emperor's grand plan. The primarchs were sucked into the Warp even as
they gestated in the gene-laboratories deep beneath the Imperial Palace, and were scattered across the
inhabited worlds of the galaxy.

During the Great Crusade all but two of the twenty primarchs were found and united with the Space
Marine Legions that had been created after their disappearances from the genetic material that they had
left behind. As the Emperor traveled across the stars, some Humans wanted to worship Him as a god,
however He forbade this, proclaiming, "I am not a god; rather than enslaving Humanity I want to free it
from ignorance and superstition."

However, Lorgar, the primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, desperate to find some outlet for his belief
that Humanity must have a god to worship to be truly whole, gave in to the constant whispers of the
Chaos Gods and, after corrupting his Legion to their service, sent his First Chaplain Erebus to poison the
minds of the other primarchs and their Legions.

Just as the Imperium had reached its apex in the first decade of the 31st Millennium, the Emperor's most
trusted son, the Primarch Horus of the Luna Wolves Legion (later renamed the Sons of Horus), fell to
Chaos as a result of his own pride, need and ambition. Horus betrayed the Emperor, and along with fully
half the Space Marine Legions and Imperial Army regiments, initiated a massive civil war for control of
the galaxy.

This rebellion is known to history as the Horus Heresy. Though the Emperor ultimately defeated Horus
during the Traitor Legions' assault on Terra, He was all but slain in the battle after suffering a crippling
loss of limbs and mortal systemic damage; only the life-supporting Golden Throne has sustained His
living corpse in a kind of stasis, neither dead nor truly alive.

Trapped within His prison of flesh, only the Emperor's mind is allowed to wander free within the
Immaterium, still seeking to protect and guide Humanity to an increasingly distant better future.

Unification Wars

The Emperor of Mankind before his internment within the Golden Throne.

The man who would later become known as the Emperor of Mankind first appears in Imperial records as
just one of the many warlords struggling for control of Terra during the later part of the Age of Strife in
the 30th Millennium.

The Emperor undertook a series of military campaigns against all the other techno-barbarian warlords
on the planet that would collectively later become known as the Unification Wars.
During these conflicts the Emperor employed several military formations -- such as the warriors of the
unit designated Geno 5-2 Chiliad who would go on to serve in the Imperial Army -- that consisted of
genetically-enhanced warriors to maximise His tactical prowess. The most powerful of these troops were
the proto-Astartes known as the Thunder Warriors.

Though physically the most potent of His creations, more deadly in combat than even the later Space
Marines, the Thunder Warriors were far from perfect. Having been created from adult troops who had
undergone a rapid process of genetic, bionic and chemical augmentation, many did have difficulty coping
with the physiological changes.

Metabolic collapse leading to rapid death was not uncommon, and many Thunder Warriors were also
prone to mental instability and even psychosis as they aged.

These warriors played a significant role in the Emperor's eventual victory over all the other warlords of
Terra and led Him to believe that His future plans to reunite Mankind would require the creation of an
even more potent core of genetically-engineered military commanders and warriors.

Following the Battle of Mount Ararat in the Kingdom of Urartu, which was the last battle of the
Unification Wars, the Unity of Old Earth was at last achieved after decades of blood, loss and fire. With
this victory, the planet and population of Terra were at last unified under the single rule of the Emperor.

But to make His dream of reuniting all of Humanity within a single galaxy-spanning empire possible, the
Emperor knew that He would have to make some difficult, even immoral decisions.

Their purpose having been achieved, the Emperor ordered all of the remaining Thunder Warriors to be
liquidated. Their imperfections and propensity for mental decay rendered them a dangerous group of
warriors to leave alive in a time of peace. They needed to be removed to make way for their eventual
successors, the Primarchs and the Space Marines.

In truth, the Emperor was right to be worried about His creations. Another source claims that even
before the Unification Wars had ended, the Thunder Warriors at last realised that their creator had
cursed them with short lifespans as a result of their imperfect genetic augmentations, and turned upon
Him for what they saw as His betrayal.

It was a cadre of several hundred Custodians, even then believed to have been commanded by the
legendary Constantin Valdor, and accompanied by several thousand prototype Astartes of the I Legion of
the newborn Space Marines, that stood in the Emperor's defence, carrying out a merciless culling of the
obsolete and rebellious gene-soldiers.

Though some Thunder Warriors successfully escaped the cull, however it happened, the vast majority of
those who survived the Unification Wars died at the hands of their own allies.

Individually or in small groups -- like the self-stylised "Dait'Tar" Thunder Warriors present during the
Cerberus Insurrection of the early Great Crusade era -- some Thunder Warriors would survive, living
mostly anonymous and miserable lives amongst the population of Terra, all honours of the past forsaken,
always fearful of being discovered.

Fortunately for these survivors, the Imperium, believing them all dead, never truly sought to hunt them
down, as all efforts were by now concentrated on the progress of the Great Crusade.

Official Imperial propaganda proclaimed that the Thunder Warriors had heroically died to the last man
during the Battle of Mount Ararat, the greatest of their number, Arik Taranis, surviving just long enough
to raise the Emperor's banner when victory, and unity, was achieved.

But the Emperor could not wipe away the stain entirely, for several Thunder Warriors managed to escape
what they called "the Culling," including Arik Taranis, who would yet have a role to play in the fate of the
Emperor's realm.

With the Unification of Terra achieved, the Emperor next set in motion His plan to defend and better
Humanity across the galaxy, by unifying those lost bastions of Mankind scattered across the myriad stars
under the aegis of the newborn Imperium. This extraordinary undertaking would become known as the
Great Crusade.

The Emperor wielding the Emperor's Sword during a battle of the Great Crusade.

Great Crusade

The Emperor prepared extensively for the Great Crusade in the years after Unity was achieved on Terra;
He created the special astro-telepath (astropath) corps to link his eventual interstellar dominion together
through the use of telepathy, and engineered the creation of the Astronomican. This was a supremely
powerful psychic navigational beacon powered by the Emperor's own will and psychic abilities that
would allow simplified and safer interstellar travel through the Warp across far greater distances than
before.

Chief amongst His designs, however, was the creation of new legions of transhuman, genetically-
engineered warriors, the logical extension of the gene-troopers already under his command, though
they would be far superior to the gene-enhanced troops of the Imperial Army He had used during the
Unification Wars.

The Emperor first undertook the Primarch Project, the creation of 20 superhuman infants whose
genomes had been designed using His own genetic code as the foundation, who were intended to
mature into powerful generals and statesmen for His armies. The Primarchs would be beings of such
great mental and physical superiority that nothing merely Human could stand against them.

To enhance the Primarchs beyond the capabilities that even genetic-engineering allowed, however, the
Emperor also drew upon the powers of the Warp he had learned at Molech to enhance His creations,
imbuing them with nearly godlike levels of charisma and capability, but also unintentionally making them
susceptible to corruption by the entities of the Warp.

However, this plan went awry with the intervention of the Ruinous Powers, who feared that the
Emperor's designs to unite and improve Humanity might succeed too well, vastly increasing the hold of
order over the universe and diminishing their own strength. It is for this reason that all of Daemonkind
refers to the Emperor as "the Anathema," the embodiment of the metaphysical opposition to Chaos.

While accounts vary as to exactly what happened, the end of the tale is always the same; the Primarchs
were cast into the Warp in their gestation chambers from beneath the Himalazian (Himalaya) Mountains
in the Emperor's gene-labs despite the multiple psychic wards the Emperor had laid down upon the
laboratory, and thought lost.

In the aftermath of these events, the Emperor conceived a new plan. Using genetic samples that had
been derived from the Primarchs' genomes, He created a caste of warriors who would possess some of
the same superhuman qualities of the Primarchs and Himself. These successors to the genetically-
enhanced Human warriors of the Unification Wars-era were the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marine
Legions of the First Founding.
After their creation, the Emperor led the 20 Space Marine Legions, all of their Astartes originally
recruited from Terran-born adolescent males, in their first missions to give them experience in war and
diplomacy through the reconquest of the rest of the Sol System.

The Space Marines drove alien slavers from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and most importantly,
achieved peace and the eventual integration of Imperial Terra with the ruling Mechanicum of Mars. This
crucial military and political alliance, formalised in the 30th Millennium with the signing of the Treaty of
Mars, provided the Emperor with much of the technological means and materiel required to extend His
crusade into the stars.

At the same time, the alliance formalised the creation of the Imperium of Man and established the
Imperial bureaucracy on Terra, integrating the Mechanicum as one of the myriad organisations that
comprised the newborn Adeptus Terra, the massive government of the Imperium, the future Priesthood
of Earth.

The Emperor at the outset of the Great Crusade.

With the final abatement of the Warp Storms caused by the birth-pangs of the Chaos God Slaanesh and
ended by the Fall of the Aeldari, the Emperor finally began the Great Crusade in ca. 798.M30 with the
campaign remembered as the First Pacification of Luna.

The Emperor's forces, concentrated amongst a rapidly growing cadre of expeditionary fleets,
rediscovered long-lost Human colony worlds, cast out alien oppressors, and claimed vast new territories
for the newborn Imperium to exploit across the galaxy.

Perhaps most importantly, the Emperor, leading His crusade, rediscovered His lost sons, the Primarchs,
as the expeditionary fleets pushed out deeper into the depths of unexplored space. Scattered across the
galaxy, the Primarchs were found one-by-one, over a period of many solar decades, and reunited with
their father and their own genetic sons in the Space Marine Legions.

All were placed in command of the Astartes Legions created from their respective gene-seed and played
a major part in forging their father's Imperium.
Together they brought thousands of worlds into Imperial Compliance, establishing the rule of the
Imperium over these worlds and inculcating in them the values of the Imperial Truth -- a materialist,
atheistic faith in reason, science and technological progress that rejected all the vestiges of Human
irrationality and superstition, including all forms of religious faith.

Only by promulgating the doctrines of the Imperial Truth did the Emperor believe He could begin to
weaken the hold of the need for faith and the other irrational aspects of the Human mind that birthed
and sustained the power of Chaos in the Warp.

The Emperor Himself declared that Mankind would never be free to progress and advance to its destined
position as the pre-eminent intelligent species in the Milky Way Galaxy until "the last stone from the last
church was cast down onto the last priest."

He had already purged ancient Terra of all its ancient religions and superstitious beliefs by the time the
Great Crusade began, even going so far as to personally witness the destruction of the final church on
Terra's ancient soil after engaging its resident holy man, Uriah Olathaire, in a battle of ideas, wit and
dogma.

The Imperial Truth also held that Humanity was the species which should rightfully rule the galaxy since
its physical form was both the most pure and all of the other intelligent alien races, such as the Aeldari,
had already tried and failed to maintain galaxy-spanning civilisations.

Now it was Humanity's turn to find a place amidst the stars. As almost all intelligent alien species
encountered by Mankind had either proven to be irrevocably hostile to Humanity or presented a future
threat to Human dominance and exploitation of the galaxy, xenos species were generally to be
exterminated outright if they presented the slightest threat or obstacle to the Imperium.

The Emperor believed the Imperial Truth needed to be brought to all the worlds of Humanity, peacefully
at first but imposed by war if necessary, because the Emperor believed that true unity was the only way
for Humanity to survive and prosper in the face of a very hostile universe.

If this required the unfortunate use of force against those who refused to understand this necessity, then
so be it. Just as He had during the Unification Wars, the Emperor again lamented the loss of innocent
lives and the curtailing of individual freedoms that the fleets of the Great Crusade sometimes trod upon,
but He could see no other way to safeguard Humanity and weaken the endless corruptive power of the
Ruinous Powers at the same time.
While the Imperial Truth upheld the light of reason and science, it did have one unbreakable
proscription: Men must never develop machines capable of true thought, what scientists had once called
artificial general intelligence.

The Emperor remembered that it was the great war fought by Humanity against the thinking machines
known as the Men of Iron that had helped to destroy Mankind's last united interstellar civilisation at the
end of the Dark Age of Technology and He had no desire to see the Human race repeat its past mistakes.

As such, when the expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade encountered advanced Human civilisations
in the dark of space that had developed artificial general intelligences, these worlds' populations were
simply exterminated outright as potential dangers to the entire body politic of the newborn Imperium.

Council of Nikaea

Additionally, there was an increasing concern as the Great Crusade progressed about the use of psychic
sorcery by agents and warriors of the Imperium. The Emperor was the most powerful Human psyker to
have ever lived, but He was deeply ambivalent about the growing spread of the mutant psyker genes
through more and more of the Human population.

He rightly believed that most of Mankind was not yet evolved enough either physically or spiritually to
truly control the great power of the Warp or avoid the corruptions and temptations offered by its more
malevolent denizens. More and more often during the progress of the Imperial conquest of the galaxy,
the Imperial Army and Space Marines would make planetfall only to find that the populace were in thrall
to mysterious powers and unnatural mystics called "sorcerers."

These people were essentially members of Chaos Cults who would resist the forces of the Emperor with
sorcerous psychic powers granted them by daemonic entities from the Warp. These psychic powers were
also very akin to those used by the Thousand Sons Legion of the Primarch Magnus the Red.

The Thousand Sons had come under intense criticism for their use of sorcery by the Primarch Mortarion
of the Death Guard Legion, who knew by his own personal experience with sorcerers on his homeworld
of Barbarus the dangers to be found in anything spawned from the Warp, and Leman Russ of the Space
Wolves Legion, for whom any battle fought through sleight of hand, clever deceit or any trick other than
straight physical combat was by definition dishonorable.
Russ found the Thousand Sons' use of sorcery distasteful in the extreme. It was Russ who fought the
hardest for the Imperium to ban the use of psychic powers after his own experiences during several
campaigns of the Great Crusade where his Space Wolves had fought beside the Thousand Sons.

The schism grew so great that it threatened the very stability of the fledgling Imperium and so the
Emperor Himself called for an Imperial conclave to resolve the issue once and for all.

Both sides of the debate over the use of psychic abilities arrived at the world of Nikaea determined to
present their views, with the Emperor as the arbiter, enthroned above the dais in an ancient
amphitheater that seated tens of thousands where the conclave was held.

On one side of the question were the Witch Hunters like the Sisters of Silence who presented their case
by reciting a litany of Human suffering inflicted upon the Emperor's own subjects by sorcerers enslaved
by what would eventually later be recognised during the Horus Heresy as Chaos, of gibbering mutants
who had lost their Humanity, and of cults and power-hungry men and women who turned their psychic
gifts to dark purposes. All present were also aware of the terrible damage that had been done by
uncontrolled and Daemon-possessed psykers during the early days of the Age of Strife.